Tag: wikileaks

The FBI requested direct access to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) hacked computer servers but was denied, Director James Comey told lawmakers on Tuesday.

The bureau made “multiple requests at different levels,” according to Comey, but ultimately struck an agreement with the DNC that a “highly respected private company” would get access and share what it found with investigators.

The director was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a rare open session on Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.

The DNC and the bureau have been quibbling in news reports over whether the FBI asked to examine its servers directly.

The DNC told BuzzFeed in a statement published last week that the FBI never requested access to its servers after they were breached.

But a senior law enforcement official disputed that characterization the following day.

“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated,” the official said.

“This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.”

CrowdStrike, the private security firm in question, has published extensive forensic analysis backing up its assessment that the threat groups that infiltrated the DNC were associated with Russian intelligence.

The Clinton Foundation has said it accepted a $1 million gift from the Qatari government without notifying the State Department that it had done so, an apparent violation of an ethics agreement Hillary Clinton signed when she became Secretary of State in 2009.

Under the terms of the agreement, Clinton promised the foundation would notify the State Department’s ethics official if a new foreign government wished to donate or if a current foreign donor wished to “increase materially” its contributions.

Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011 to mark former President Bill Clinton’s 65th birthday. The following April, Amitabh Desai, the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, emailed several of his colleagues to say that the Qataris wanted to meet Bill Clinton “‘for five minutes’ in NYC to present [the] check.” Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state until Feb. 1, 2013.

When contacted by Reuters, which first reported on the deal’s ethical ramifications, Clinton Foundation spokesman Brian Cookstra said the $1 million gift did not constitute a “material increase” in the Middle Eastern nation’s contributions.

Reuters, citing the foundation’s own website, reported that Qatar’s own government has directly given a total of between $1 million and $5 million over the years.

The State Department told the news agency it had no record of the Qatar donation and said it was up to the foundation to submit it for review.

The number of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation has opened the Democratic nominee up to conflict-of-interest accusations and raises the possibility that donors gave money with the expectation of receiving political favors in return.

Republican nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Clinton to return donations from countries like Qatar, which has a questionable human rights record.

Last year, the Foundation admitted that no complete list of donors to its health program, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, had been published since 2010, despite promises from Clinton two years earlier that such a list would be produced annually.

The email from Desai was part of a trove of hacked messages from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account that were published by Wikileaks last month.

On the same day the New York Times published a blockbuster report detailing Hillary Clinton’s use of a secret e-mail server, Clinton’s campaign chairman told Clinton’s chief of staff that “we are going to have to dump all those e-mails so better to do sooner than later.”

“On another matter…and not to sound like Lanny [Davis],” Podesta wrote to Mills, “but we are going to have to dump all those e-mails so better to do sooner than later.”

Podesta’s recommendation was sent at 10:57 p.m. on the same day the New York Timesrevealedthat Clinton had exclusively used a secret, private e-mail server her entire tenure as Secretary of State:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

Although it is unclear whether Podesta was specifically referring to the tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton and her staff sent to each other while Clinton served as Secretary of State, the timing of the e-mail — immediately following the publication of the New York Times report which detailed for the first time Clinton’s exclusive use of a secret, off-books e-mail server — suggests that he was indeed referring to the e-mails from Clinton and her staff from 2009 through 2013.

Five days after Podesta told Mills, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department and who currently serves as an adviser and attorney to the Democratic presidential candidate, that “we are going to have to dump all those e-mails,” Mills e-mailed Podesta that “we need to clean this up.”

Mills’ panicked e-mail to Podesta came after President Barack Obama publicly claimed that he knew nothing about Clinton’s private e-mail setup until he read about it on the news.

“[Obama] has e-mails from [Clinton],” Mills wrote. “[T]hey do not say state.gov.”

Neither Podesta nor Mills has authenticated the e-mail released by Wikileaks, nor has either denied the record’s authenticity. It is also possible that Podesta’s “dump those emails” recommendation could be a reference to an entirely different batch of e-mails, or it could be a recommendation that Clinton’s inner circle should quickly turn all of the records over to the relevant federal authorities. On March 4, 2015, just two days after Podesta’s e-mail, a congressional committee officially subpoenaed Clinton’s e-mails.

Clinton’s presidential campaign was rocked by news last Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had reopened its criminal investigation of the Democratic nominee’s e-mail setup at the State Department. Recently released national polls show a recent tightening of the race between Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, while state polls suggest that Clinton still has a healthy lead in the race for 270 electoral votes.

Wikileaks tweeted today that multiple source have leaked information that confirm Secretary of State John Kerry asked the Ecuadorian Government to stop Assange from publishing Clinton Emails. More proof that the US Government is the strong arm of the left:

As soon as the nomination is wrapped up, I will be your biggest surrogate,” current Interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Donna Brazile, wrote to Podesta in a January 2016 email. As a Vice Chair of the DNC, Brazile was bound to neutrality per the charter, but as shown in several emails released so far, that was not the case. WIKILEAKS

“I pushed back hard on this, and Axe. So weird to attack the kids the night before the first primary,” Brazile wrote in an email she forwarded to Podesta about what CNN was doing while she served as a CNN contributor. WIKILEAKS

On October 10, an email was released that showed Brazile tipping off the Clinton camp to an outreach campaign being conducted by the Sanders campaign. Brazile defended herself on Twitter claiming she also sent the Sanders campaign “advice,” but did not release or cite any examples.

An April 2015 email describes the Clinton campaign and DNC coordinating to rig the debate schedule for Clinton’s benefit. The debate schedule was a commonly cited criticism against then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned after the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails in July showed her overt favoritism for Clinton all through the primaries.

Through internal discussions, we concluded that it was in our interest to: 1) limit the number of debates (and the number in each state); 2) start the debates as late as possible; 3) keep debates out of the busy window between February 1 and February 27, 2016 (Iowa to South Carolina)” read the email from Charlie Baker, a senior advisor to the Clinton campaign from the Dewey Square Group. “The other campaigns have advocated (not surprisingly) for more debates and for the schedule to start significantly earlier.” WIKILEAKS

An email from November 2014 shows Clinton campaign staff backing a law that would push the Illinois primary from March to April or May, with their reasoning being that the state could potentially serve as a lifeline to moderate Republicans as it did for Mitt Romney in 2012.

“The Clintons won’t forget what their friends have done for them. It would be helpful to feel out what path, if any, we have to get them to yes. This will probably take some pushing,” wrote Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook to Podesta. WIKILEAKS

The primary wound up not being moved, with Trump winning Illinois, but the push was strategic as Clinton didn’t poll well against moderate Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. John Kasich.

In damage control over a false statement Clinton made about Nancy Reagan’s role in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Clinton campaign noted in an email chain that they would have to coerce Clinton into admitting she was wrong.

Here is a revised draft of a statement. It does include the words ‘I made a mistake’ in the first line. We need a strategy for getting her to approve this.” WIKILEAKS

And then there’s the overly docile press, who were so eager to help Clinton get elected. In one email chain discussing the upcoming release of exchanges between Clinton and writer Sidney Blumenthal, insiders noted that the Associated Press appeared to be willing to allow the Clinton campaign to plant favorable stories.

They are considering placing a story with a friendly at the AP (Matt Lee or Bradley Klapper), that would lay this out before the majority on the committee has a chance to realize what they have and distort it,” wrote Nick Merrill, the Clinton campaign’s traveling press secretary.

“She is going to read me the story later today off the record to further assure me,” Clinton campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri wrote in an email to Podesta and other staff about New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman coordinating directly with the campaign to provide Clinton with favorable coverage. WIKILEAKS

On October 11, The Young Turks’ Jordan Chariton first reported another email that showed Brazile tipping off the Clinton campaign to a question on the death penalty that would be asked at a CNN Town Hall the next day. Brazile was a CNN contributor at the time, and that wasn’t her only helpful tip. “For the debate team,” she wrote in a March email about the Voting Rights Act, forwarded to Podesta.

She is going to read me the story later today off the record to further assure me,” Clinton campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri wrote in an email to Podesta and other staff about New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman coordinating directly with the campaign to provide Clinton with favorable coverage. WIKILEAKS

Much of this confirms the suspicions of Trump supporters. The question is, if he loses the election, how and when does it stop? It seems as though if Clinton wins the election are only protection against full blown socialist takeover is Article 5 in the Constitution.